The Thesis: Practice and Escapism

Years and years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I did a psychological study that looked at the relationship between gamers and the characters they played.

I had two phases of questionnaires, one asking a lot of standard personality index questions and the second asking what kind of character the person played, how their character would handle different in-game situations and so on.

My theory was that if you compared self-acceptance (how much a person liked who they were) versus character similarity (how similar the character they choose to play was to their personality in real life) you would find an arc.

On one end, the people who didn’t like themselves very much (low self-acceptance) would choose to play characters that weren’t like them (low character similarity), because they would want to escape or (more productively) practice a different personality to arm themselves for switching in real life. I want to be a bolder person, so I practice being bold in the game.

In the middle we have people who were moderately happy about themselves (medium self-acceptance), who I predicted would play characters that were a lot like themselves (high character similarity). For them roleplaying was really just more practice being themselves. They weren’t comfortable enough to expand their horizons with radically different roles, nor were they unhappy enough to want escape from their personality.

On the other end, people who were very happy with themselves (high self-acceptance) would play characters that were different (low character similarity). Why? Because they could experiment with different roles without the risks and sanctions of being (for example) an evil dictator in the real world. They were comfortable enough with their current personality to try new things and learn from those experiments.

Fear my ancient bitmapped graphic!

But does it hold water?

After all the data was compiled and the numbers crunched, I found… well, not a lot. I didn’t have a ton of subjects (less than 50), so while there were hints of the curve I expected the results were not, as they say, statistically significant.*

The real question is: years later, do I still think this theory makes sense?

Probably. I haven’t thought about character vs player this way in a while, but it still seems to shed light on what I see in games now. Agree? Disagree? That’s what the comments section is for.

Funny story: shortly after I finished, I sent a copy of my research to the editor of Dragon Magazine. I never got a reply, but shortly thereafter came an editorial (Dragon #164, “What you are in the dark”) that was pretty much a “nothing to see here” summary, without ever mentioning the existence of my research. Go figure.

* Complete tangent: I want to see a game that uses statistical significance as a mechanic:

“I hit the ogre!”
“Yeah, but not by enough to be statistically significant. We can’t say confidently that your swing was the result of your warrior’s skill and not just chance. This fight isn’t a big enough sample size.”
“So is the ogre dead?”
“Maybe, or it might just be an artifact of the data.”

Amazing…I was a participant in a study very similar to this. Some of my friends in college did the study for their psych class paper, interviewing RPG players to try and work on a theory very close to this. I don’t remember if the premise was identical or not, but it was something extremely close.

@ Brian Ballsun-Stanton: This research was a long time ago, but anybody that wants to update the methodology and take it a step further has my blessing. Heck, you don’t even need my blessing — that’s the true tradition of science and academic research. I can give you the reference to the original paper for your bibliography ;)

@ Shawn: There were doubtless a lot of flaws in the methodology, but the approach was to ask the participants to make a character they would want to play, with the rest of the questionnaire describing adventure situations and asking what their character would do. Of course the participants didn’t know the object of the study, so they didn’t know that what kind of character they chose in the first place is important.

One significant shortcoming I see in such a questionnaire / theorem is simply the question of “Which character?” Most, if not all, of the people I’ve gamed with over the years have played a variety of characters with individual personalities. If the questions are to be considered only in light of the current character you may (or may not) find correlation. But correlation is not causation. Is your theory viable if the majority of characters played by a given individual are dissimilar?

This is.. fascinating. E-mail me if you actually want to turn this into a paper — I see a number of… avenues.

Anyways, the positivist stance here is fascinating (Scene: two groups of ragtag [academicians] standing across a [board room] roughly 20 feet by 20 feet :)… ) The problem is that the *internal* sample size is too low. It’s not enough to ask about the “character” one is currently playing, assuming one is only playing one game, but present and past characters. Also, you need to demographically seperate LARPers from normal tabletop gamers…. and the character one plays in both.

In terms of testing this, the experiment methodology would need to present personality tests for each of the characters a player plays. If we wanted to go positivist. I think triangulating and doing a series of interviews *and* collecting the artefacts (or a copy thereof) from each gamer would be quite significant in itself.